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Mothers' talk to children with Down Syndrome, language impairment, or typical development about familiar and unfamiliar nouns and verbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2015

ELIZABETH KAY-RAINING BIRD  and
PATRICIA CLEAVE
ELIZABETH KAY-RAINING BIRD*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Canada
PATRICIA CLEAVE
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Canada
*
Address for correspondence: Dalhousie University – Human Communication Disorders, Box 15000, 1256 Brington Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2, Canada. e-mail: rainbird@dal.ca
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Abstract

This study investigated how forty-six mothers modified their talk about familiar and unfamiliar nouns and verbs when interacting with their children with Down Syndrome (DS), language impairment (LI), or typical development (TD). Children (MLUs < 2·7) were group-matched on expressive vocabulary size. Mother–child dyads were recorded playing with toy animals (noun task) and action boxes (verb task). Mothers of children with DS used shorter utterances and more verb labels in salient positions than the other two groups. All mothers produced unfamiliar target nouns in short utterances, in utterance-final position, and with the referent perceptually available. Mothers also talked more about familiar nouns and verbs and labelled them more often and more consistently. These findings suggest that mothers of children in the early period of language development fine-tune their input in ways that reflect their children's vocabulary knowledge, but do so differently for nouns and verbs.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 5 , September 2016 , pp. 1072 - 1102
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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